. . . These days the old-time music and dance scene
is predominantly white. It is rare to see an African-American
musician or dancer at Mt. Airy, Clifftop, or other music
festivals where old-time or bluegrass music is being
played. There are a few, such as fiddler Earl White,
who was an early member of the Green Grass Cloggers,
but how many other black old-time musicians or dancers
do you know? That is why I remember the day, a number
of years ago, when I first saw Arthur Grimes. He was
clogging in cowboy boots at a square dance I was calling
at Merlefest in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Since
that time, we have become friends, and we have shared
the dance floor many times. But it wasn’t until
last December, when I interviewed him at the Boone Drug
Store in Boone, that I learned how he got involved in
old-time dancing.

Arthur Grimes was born in 1958, in Watauga County, an
Appalachian county in western North Carolina with an
African-American population of less than two percent.
One of eight children, he grew up in the Junaluska neighborhood
of Boone, a black community consisting of several dozen
families. Though he is aware of the African-American
roots of old-time music and dance, Arthur did not learn
his dancing from his family or the black community.

As a teenager in the early ’70s, Arthur discovered
that he liked old-time and bluegrass music, and even
before he learned to dance to it, he attended the Union
Grove Festival with some white friends from Boone. He
says:

I used to listen to it. I’d buy old bluegrass
albums and listen to them, but I didn’t know how
to dance then, and that’s what gave me the idea
that I could teach myself how to dance. I wanted to do
something different...and that’s why I chose bluegrass
and old-time music and clog dancing... I didn’t
see no blacks doing that kind of thing, so that’s
why I wanted to see if I could get into something like
that.

Arthur started to teach himself how to dance in 1975. “I
taught myself on my mama’s back porch, of all places.
[Laughs] I just kept doing it every evening when I got
out of school. . . ” His family teased him about
his dancing and called him, “country boy.” “It
took me a while," he says, "before I’d
go out in public and do it though. I didn’t know
if I was doing it right.” His family never saw
Arthur perform until two years ago [in 2002] when he
volunteered to clog at his niece’s wedding reception
in Boone and danced to a CD of Earl Scrugg’s “Foggy
Mountain Breakdown.”